This news will make IPL sides feel better about buying him now too...a few murmurs from a few sides about worries over his unavaliablity, but with this news means sides will pour in with the bids now i would have thought..

I actually more interested in Root TBH.Personally reckon he is going for the money, which I don't blame him for but what would he actually do if he goes for base price, personally speaking if I was him I wouldn't actually go lol.don't really see what he gets out of the ipl unless he gets paid more than his ECB deal, or at least 3/4 of it.I believe root gets around 1.5 M playing for England, the minimum root is getting is £ 225,000 that is assuming he gets brought for the base price.that good enough for the likes of Billings and the fringe england players but for someone captaining england and playing all 3 formats of the game you really want the wages to be life changing like Stokes and Mills got last year.Although I suspect the lowest root is going for is around £750,000, suspect root will get something around £1M.

last year Stokes was the highest at £1.7 M with the franchise having way more money now I suspect the highest paid player will get around 2M now.which is why ECB can't stop players playing IPL anymore considering chances the very good players could earn double to what ECB plays them and the fringe players could realistically earn 3-4 times more than what an ECB white contract is worth.

At the moment Kohli the highest paid cricketer in the ipl his contract worth £1.95M suspect he might get beaten in the auction though but not by much though.

TBH KP only said that because he was getting a deal matching or very close to matching ECB deal, the likes of Swann, Anderson, Broad etc did sometimes try to enter the IPL but they either didn't get brought or would get low bids.Broad got brought one year but didn't play a game, what they were getting were peanuts compared to what ECB were paying them.it didn't really help that KP use to show off in the dressing room on how much he was getting paid in the ipl and frankly speaking no one in that team were going to get big bucks in the ipl.bit different now in the current set up considering england white ball team is 100 times better than the test team.

just really the question would Root play in the competition if he getting a bad deal out of it.the reason why the likes of Swann, broad, Anderson etc didn't really get brought in the ipl when they did enter or didn't actually enter was that none of the franchise gave assurances of what they would be getting and they probably made it clear to the ipl that we wouldn't actually be going if we don't get a set amount of money.

Selection of Jonny for the ODI format and promoting him as a opener is a master stroke. Finally something that selectors got something spectaculary correct. Result and performance oriented selection this.

The scouting system was overhauled last year, when they hired some former headteacher with no experience in cricket that I know of to redesign the system. I believe that he wants to model the whole system on an NFL team, or certainly that has been reported (as early as today in the Telegraph, amongst other comments previously). Even Athers in the Times said the ECB had been working with Cleveland Browns to gain insight into how it works. To me, that is incredibly laughable. Modelling your scouting system on a sport that is about as accurate in its predictions as the average lottery ticket buyer is worrying. It increases when, and I do not in anyway overstate this, the Cleveland Browns are notorious in the NFL for being a draft busting disaster. Its essentially the equivalent of asking Nick Leeson his opinion on lists of low yield, ultra safe stock market picks.

One only has to look at the NFL to see how scouting in the sport is not very good. Take for instance the QBs to go to the hall of fame since 2000. Favre was drafted near dead last, seen as a no hoper and a bad learner, and was released by the Falcons after playing about 8 seconds of actual football inside his first few games. Warren Moon went undrafted completely, and had to come through Canadian football (the equivalent of being 25 and being bought in English football from the Rymans league after you turn up as a no hoper and score 120 goals in a season). Kurt Warner didnt have his NFL debut till 28, having already been undrafted and went to the Canadian minor league. He was stacking shelves at minimum wage while playing for years. Those still playing who are shoe in for the HOF after retirement, Brady was another no hope who barely made the draft and only got a game because the QB was crippled and the other back ups were injured. Brees went 3rd round and was seen as barely good enough to play at that level. Rodgers was off the charts on all measures but dropped down 24 places to a number of inferior players. The list of top "wonderlic" scouting scores is a wasteland of players who never made it, with the odd one there who cut it.

To put that in laymans terms, its would be like saying in a list of Ronaldo, Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, De Bruyne, Aguero and Maradona, the scouts thought over half of these players were not even good enough to be considered within the top 150-200 players of the same age in the world. Its ok to fob that off, but when you think about the fact that these are ignorant judgement either. You can access any given scouting report, they are massively extensive, they measure everything, and are done for every single player entering the NFL draft. So it is literally a case of widespread failure in the scouting systems to identify them, because not only does every team make a judgement, there are 1000s of scouts producing independent judges.